(The lines represent the 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of the sample)
Posted on 09/01/2010 8:33:44 AM PDT by a fool in paradise
An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?
The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers.
And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.
At least, that’s how the thinking goes in the tech industry.
(The lines represent the 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of the sample)
In their book Chips and Change, Professors Clair Brown and Greg Linden, of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics and census data for the semiconductor industry and found that salaries increased dramatically for engineers during their 30s but that these increases slowed after the age of 40. At greater ages still, salaries started dropping, dependent on the level of education. After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50. Curiously, Brown and Linden also found that salary increases for holders of postgraduate
degrees were always lower than increases for those with bachelor’s degrees (in other words, even PhD degrees didn’t provide long-term job protection). It’s not much different in the software/internet industry. If anything, things in these fast-moving industries are much worse for older workers.
For tech startups, it usually boils down to cost: most can’t even afford to pay $60K salaries, so they look for motivated, young software developers who will accept minimum wage in return for equity ownership and the opportunity to build their careers. Companies like Zoho can afford to pay market salaries, but can’t find the experienced workers they need. In 2006, Zoho’s CEO, Sridhar Vembu, initiated an experiment to hire 17-year-olds directly out of high school. He found that within two years, the work performance of these recruits was indistinguishable from that of their college-educated peers. Some ended up becoming superstar software developers.
Companies such as Microsoft say that they try to maintain a balance but that it isn’t easy. An old friend, David Vaskevitch, who was Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer at Microsoft, told me in 2008 that he believes that younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative. But there is a lot they don’t know and can’t know until they gain experience. So Microsoft aggressively recruits for fresh talent on university campuses and for highly experienced engineers from within the industry, one not at the expense of the other. David acknowledged that the vast majority of new Microsoft employees are young, but said that this is so because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with. It was all about hiring the best and brightest, he said; age and nationality are not important.
So whether we like it or not, it’s a tough industry. I know that some techies will take offense at what I have to say, but here is my advice to those whose hair is beginning to grey:
My advice to managers is to consider the value of the experience that the techies bring. With age frequently come wisdom and abilities to follow direction, mentor, and lead. Older workers also tend to be more pragmatic and loyal, and to know the importance of being team players. And ego and arrogance usually fade with age. During my tech days, I hired several programmers who were over 50. They were the steadiest performers and stayed with me through the most difficult times.
Finally, I don’t know of any university, including the ones I teach at, that tells its engineering students what to expect in the long term or how to manage their technical careers. Perhaps it is time to let students know what lies ahead.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa 
is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.
What, you get outdated skills and still demand huge salaries and spend all day whining on a forum that life is unfair?
I think I’m catching on. ;)
I don’t think of the silicon valley/microsoft programming warehouses as a real place of employment for real engineers.
Two, three thousand line routines? nested 6, 7, 8 time deep? And that's good code? Not in my world. If I had EVER, EVER written any thing like that I would have turned off my computer and gone to get drunk.
I have seen the same in engineering and construction outfits. One company in Houston, a big name in the energy industry, let go of a lot of senior engineers, then ran ads for engineers with 0-2 years experience. They had the newbies copy much of the work of the old engineers, yet - all they did was copy. Cookie cutter engineering, touted as part of their “quality” program. Of course when it gets out to the field there was a LOT of expensive re-work.
The “quality” program had a lot of nifty slogan signs, one of which was:
1. Define the requirement
2. Plan the work
3. Work the plan.
A lot of the newbies could not get past step 1. Besides, engineering was just a stepping stone to upper management. The ticket puncher mentality was not encouraged, it was expected.
Programming, at whatever level, has always taken longer to work through than normal biological schedules allow ~ so those who can do it get the work.
You can't replace this with a team of people.
¡ SV Bump !
My certs are current, Sonny. I expect the prevailing wage for people with my skill set. Being nearly 58 is my only sin.
As I said, you will face it some day if you live long enough.
I am 53. I just started at hardware startup 1 week ago. I am working 60 hour weeks for a few reasons. I am getting over 3% of the company stock. I aw unemployed 6 months. I had to take a 15% paycut. However, 15% is far better than zero income. I willingly signed up for this gamble, ane it is the classic silicon valley gamble. Stock vs lower pay and long hours. What is interesting is the experienced old fart with the same old tool set is out performing thf youngster 5 to 1 in production of code and documentation. Its called working smarter. Fewer mistakes and knowing what the documentation has to contain. Also IKl knew what I was signing up for.
I am 53. I just started at hardware startup 1 week ago. I am working 60 hour weeks for a few reasons. I am getting over 3% of the company stock. I aw unemployed 6 months. I had to take a 15% paycut. However, 15% is far better than zero income. I willingly signed up for this gamble, ane it is the classic silicon valley gamble. Stock vs lower pay and long hours. What is interesting is the experienced old fart with the same old tool set is out performing thf youngster 5 to 1 in production of code and documentation. Its called working smarter. Fewer mistakes and knowing what the documentation has to contain. Also IKl knew what I was signing up for.
Welp obviously there’s no/little demand for your skill at your payrate. I’ve already been there, I moved to my current city with barely the change in my pocket and worked my way up to my current position. I had to adapt and “think outside the box” and I certainly didn’t spend all day whining in a forum. “Woe is me, woe is me.”
Time for a change.
Or go for a government job, they are almost entirely secure.
I’m just not a fan of self-pity, sorry. And I speak from experience as someone who had that mentality for too long.
Everyone competes for jobs. Including you.
So you have to deal with it.
“Old engineers’” dark secrets: most aren’t worth more than a new college grad.
I’ve been in the technical side for 25+ years with no interest in moving into management and no shortage of jobs when I look or offers when I’m not looking.
Since the mid 90s, too many new “engineers” know how to use tools, but don’t have understand what those tools are doing. That works fine for the first 3-5 years when a senior engineer can help.
But in 5 years you need to learn the basics of your field
1) what are your tools doing, not just how to use the tools. Can you work without the tools, or created the tools if you move to a platform where they don’t exist
2) have a feel for engineering aspects of your job. Is this a stable design? Many experienced “engineers” can create a “valid” and pretty design (CAD, schematics, software, UML, database, visio, whatever) but don’t understand the stress points even after you show them. I’m mostly software, but can find flaws in databases or hardware schematics. I know hardware and database engineers who can’t program (as a job) but can look at my designs and “feel” the weak points.
And, over your career you need to keep up with technology that is being used.
I think you are full of it.
Aint that the truth. We need to outsource gov workers and politicians. We could save 90% and solve all our problems.
I’m a front end manager searching for a job in South FL for the last year and a half and I have most certainly run up against age discrimination. I’m 43 but very gray. For my next interview my wife insists I color my hair.
The trick as one gets older is to understand your own market. Don’t aim for the bleeding edge, bleeding edge companies like young engineers. Aim for the stable middle. The company I work for my 41 years puts me on the young side for the engineers, we’ve got a lot of late 40s and early 50s people. Yeah we tend to be 2 or 3 versions of Visual Studio behind, .Net 3.x not 4, ASP not SilverLight; we also tend to work 40 hour weeks and get a major revision to a 90 million dollar revenue product out every year with half the team all the books say a product of our size and complexity needs. Nobody fresh out of college wants to work here because it’s not “exciting”, and frankly we don’t want them because their code sucks and their problem solving usually starts with some new toy that’s never been used in a fortune 500 sized company before and will probably crash when 100 user connect to it.
The flip-side being that this approach, applied every time, increases cost and takes a lot more time.
Sometimes it's faster and cheaper and just as effective to lean on experience to get something done.
I'm not against looking for new ways of doing things -- but to go for new just because it's new is not always the right thing to do.
> “or start your own business if you are not a cry baby.”
.
Worked for me, and there is no way I’d ever consider going back to being an ‘employee.’
A_Former_Democrat ~ That’s a travesty . .
Perhaps. OTOH, we get some superb engineers and scientists, who are hard working and dedicated employees who are delighted to be living in America. Importing H-1Bs is far preferable to exporting the entire manufacturing base elsewhere.
And yes, I've been replaced by H-1Bs on several occasions.
I’m somewhere over 50, but I look younger, which helps (sometimes!), and here’s my experience.
a. MOST of the younger people now have a terrible work ethic, particularly, I’m sorry to say, native Americans.
b. MOST of the H1-B’s are worthless. They do, however, work together very well and eventually can solve a problem (native born people are far too egotistical to do this). Fortunately, I’m still worth almost any number of them.
c. I can’t compete with younger people in terms of cutting edge code, because I won’t put 15+ hours a day getting good at it (which I actually DID 30 years ago). HOWEVER, in terms of analyzing systems and finding errors (even in languages I don’t even write in), I’m untouchable, which is a very, very valuable skill and fortunately, management is aware of it.
For now...
d. One “unwritten” (for legal reasons) advantage of older workers is that they don’t lose about an average of 5 hours a week on soccer practice, parent-teacher conferences, divorce proceedings, custody battles, kid’s doctor appointments, and so on. Again, not written anywhere, but...
I should also add, that writing code is one thing, and writing bulletproof, lights-out code where you anticipate failure points, build in metrics, and so on is another. Younger programmers can’t/won’t do this because their code is perfect, the environment is perfect, the operating system is perfect, the error-handling system is perfect, the tools are perfect, and “the end user would never do that”. Doing THAT takes experience - and I’ve been writing code and getting paid for it for more than a third of a century, and it took a good fraction of that to get “really good”.
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